Render faster, meat your deadlines and spare a lot of money. E-Cycles is a fork of Cycles which renders up to 2.5x faster out of the box when using NVidia GPUs, up to 13x using new options and with same visual quality, up to even 41x faster for real time speed. Better than other third-party engines, E-Cycles is 100% compatible with all your assets, scenes and add-ons so you can start rendering faster and get better denoising the second after you unpacked it!

Huge speedup rendering #FLIPFluids using @ECycles1 with great results! Check out this render comparison between Cycles and E-Cycles by Alleyne Studio. 144 seconds down to 45 seconds, Wow!
E-Cycles can be found on the Blender Market: blendermarket.com/products/e-cyc…

The RTX version supports a subset of the standard version’s features. Please have a look to the known limitations on the product page

How does it work

The speedup out of the box (open the file, hit render) is achieved thanks to:

better memory access

better parallelism so that all CUDA cores are better occupied

You can get more speedup thanks to the following new/enhanced options:

An enhanced path simplification (up to 3x faster, stacks with the out-of-the-box speedup)

A new AI denoiser addon which works at very low sample (interiors can be rendered for animation with less than 200 samples, compared to over 1000 usually.

an option to only do the pre-processing step once per video for flythrough (where only the camera moves, only available in 2.79x based version, based on a patch from Lukas Stockner)

Scrambling distance, which both reduce the noise and offer better performance.

You can have a look to the following video for a result of using most of the above mentioned techniques to get about 14x faster render (5 minutes to 22 seconds on a single 1080Ti). A short tutorial showing how the scene was setup is included in all E-Cycles versions.

Huge speedup rendering #FLIPFluids using @ECycles1 with great results! Check out this render comparison between Cycles and E-Cycles by Alleyne Studio. 144 seconds down to 45 seconds, Wow!
E-Cycles can be found on the Blender Market: blendermarket.com/products/e-cyc…

Flavio Della Tommasa “Obviously in terms of performance I believe the data speak for themselves. On 8 images, 2h each, I lost a day of calculation. With E-Cycles, in just over 2 hours I solved everything.” Original post here

And don’t forget:
As a previous OctaneBlender user I can tell:
You don’t have the large add-ons available for materials like E-Cycles has…
There is the LiveDB but it still crashes blender a lot, and some materials don’t work anymore
(they just turn any object transparent ;o)
You need an internet connection to activate a license…
and hopefully it automatically deactivates after quitting (in case of crash it stays locked to the machine and can’t be used on another host)
You need to cr…

Is it compatible with Blender?
Yes, Blender is actually untouched, only Cycles was modified. So it’s 100% compatible with the official version.

Is it worth for me?
If you render at least with a 70€ Cuda card supported by Blender on Windows or Linux, you get this build amortized immediately in most cases and on the long run anyway due to the electricity you spare compared to rendering longer or rendering with more cards.
Note that it’s CUDA GPU only for now.

Can I take only one or two month?
Yes, you stay as long as you want, you are free, and you continue to get updates for the month you have paid. The reduced price can apply to the following months if you keep your membership without interruption.

Do the build work after my Membership finished?
Yes.

Is it open source?
Yes, of course. I even offer a course, with which you can learn how I made the optimizations, how to add new modifiers, customize the UI to streamline your workflow, etc.

So much faster, really?
Check other customers render times here in the thread An example of what is possible with a scene rendering in more than 5 minutes normally, using all the new options of E-Cycles, here only 5 seconds:

Pre and post-processing:
E-Cycles on average is like adding another GPU to your configuration. Just like another GPU would, E-Cycles will make the rendering phase faster. Pre-and post-processing are done on CPU in Blender and will be as fast as before in E-Cycles.

Multi-GPU configurations and denoising:
due to a new bug in Blender on multi-gpu configurations, only the AI denoiser on 2.79x is officially supported when using multi-GPU configurations. If you want to use the AI denoiser on 2.8x with multiple GPUs, I keep a version of E-Cycles from 16th of May (v20190516) available, which doesn’t has the bug and thus is fast. The non-AI-denoiser is slower with multiple GPUs in all versions. It’s still faster than the official builds. Single GPU configurations work properly. A fix for the above-mentioned bug is being worked on.

Low samples renders:
E-Cycles produces higher quality samples (lower noise at same sample count). At comparable noise level, E-cycles is around 2x faster, but at low samples (under 64) you may have to tweak your sample count manually. Earlier version of E-Cycles had automatic sample count for such case, but it was decided after feedback from users to let the user decide if they want a cleaner render or a faster one in this rare case.

CPU+GPU rendering:
While many user report good times with CPU+GPU on E-Cycles, only CUDA GPU rendering is officially supported.

What can I expect in my case?
On Cuda cards, a lot. On a 1080Ti, most of the time you can expect to render 1.65x to 2.42x faster rendering with path tracing (in the time you rendered 1 picture before, you can then render 1.65 to 2.42 of them). The time is for the path tracing itself. Long pre-processing time can make the overall speedup smaller.
Here is a table of the times on the 1080Ti and Vega64 to see which kind of scene get which speedup.

What if it doesn’t work so well on my configuration ?
You have 30 days money back guarantee. If you are provide a real production files where the path tracing phase is less than 1,5x faster using CUDA GPU rendering, you get a full refund. Cases like “my 64 thread threadripper and 1050Ti render nearly as fast with master as with E-Cycles” or “my scene which has 2 minutes preprocessing time and 5sec path tracing render only 2 sec faster” are normal and are not accepted for refund. Again, only the path tracing phase using a CUDA GPU is optimized. Only for Flythrough (only the camera moving) and using 2.79x builds is the preprocessing time done once for videos, which can greatly reduce overall render time. A file also has to be provided, just like for any bug report for any program you buy.

What about the cool features added regularly in Blender’s builds?
You get free updates every week to always get the latest improvements made in master and there will be 1 feature or optimization added every month.

How do I report bugs?
Blender at the time of writing has 1700+ bugs opened. Check first that the problem you experience is not in the latest buildbots and that it’s a bug happening during rendering itself. If it only happens in this build, you can make a bug report. Please attach a blend file (links to google drive, we-transfer, etc. for big files are ok), the steps to reproduce and your configuration. On Gumroad, answer your emails about E-Cylces, on Blender Market, use the “create message” button on the product page.

Which GPU are supported?
Only CUDA GPUs supported in official Blender.
Although not officially supported, several AMD GPU and CPU users also use E-Cycles for it’s new optionsand still get up to 20% faster rendering out of the box.

Is CPU rendering also faster?
Not yet. I’m working on normal CPU rendering, maybe it will be added later as a monthly feature. For the same reason as above, several user use E-Cycles on CPU still for it’s new options and faster user interface.

I am expecting nothing less than a secondary bounce solver like Corona UHD cache, RT for the image should exactly be 24:12 (plus some seconds for denoising) because it is Christmas-Time. Joke aside every speedup for Cycles is welcome, will watch this closely!

So your point is that I’m a bad person because I don’t work for free all the time. 3 years of free patches and builds are not enough, I should do it my whole life? You know the Official devs are paid ? Some people here write addons for free, some sell, some do both, but it’s right because it’s python and I’m wrong because it’s C/C++?
What the reasoning behind that, please explain?

And regarding the posting/giving to the devs: This patch for example: https://developer.blender.org/D2254, lot’s of discussion, happy users who saw real benefits with it https://developer.blender.org/D2254#53699, I rewrote it in 3 parts, still nothing in master. Days lost at speaking. And it’s not only me. You only see the devs staying, but on the tracker, you can find many devs who posted patches, got ignored or rejected for politics and never came back. Speak with the fracture modifier in PM, you will see what they thing about posting patches for inclusion. And at that time, Blender had sometime less than 100 open bugs… Why would that be any better in your opinion now that 2.8 must be made stable with more than 1300 bugs opened, please also explain?

In the course, you get the code, so you can do the updates yourself (everything included in this build is in the course) and you can even do the review process for the parts you want to have in master. With this option, I do all the work for my clients during a full year, so that you just have to click to download like for the buildbots. It’s just some people like to do things themself, they can take part to the course other prefer ready to use products with support, they can take this option.

If it really boost up cycle by 40% don’t worry I will buy and follow your course Price is not the question. And the pain to maintain a custom build is quite low compared to a 40% speed up…

think by learning everyone how to code in c you are doing a fantastic job.

I was just asking how it’s possible to achieve this, that’s all, the only reason I could find is that the code is hardware specific to each user but ,visibly it’s not. That was resolving a lot of questions like why you’re selling a full course about coding aside with this speed up and the incompatibility for it to become master.

And we’ll I didn’t know that blender devs are so hard with C++ additions to master… its quite sad

“And we’ll I didn’t know that blender devs are so hard with C++ additions to master… its quite sad”
Sometime it’s positive. Quality code is also important in a codebase many person work with, but sometime it’s based on opinion with few technical arguments, sometime it’s just they have way too much to do and simply have to do choices, but whatever the reason is, in the end it hurts and takes time which can be invested more wisely.